DreamWeek brings MLK’s life, legacy front and center

DreamWeek was born just five years ago as an adjunct to the city’s well-established MLK March, an event like no other in the country in celebrating Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and legacy.

The project had lofty goals from the get-go, ironically never fitting into just one week. It has grown exponentially, featuring more than 165 events that end Jan. 21.

Its noble mission is to advance tolerance, equality and diversity, big dreams given the state of the union. But it’s not a pipe dream. The national divide makes it more essential than ever. Tolerance, however, is just a starting point toward equality and inclusion.

DreamWeek’s approach is simple, really. It invites disparate people under one roof for talks, films, poetry, music and other events. Some begin and end with the breaking of bread, an ancient tradition that remains critical to understanding.

That’s the essence of DreamWeek, said founder Sho Nakpodia, whose firm The Mighty Group guides DreamWeek.

Photographer and artist Sarah Brooke Lyons, who has been involved in many of its events, points out that DreamWeek is different than Fiesta, the city’s other massive event.

She defines it as its “ intentionally.”

While Fiesta reinforces the city’s history and traditions, DreamWeek attempts to expand it with “information to be gathered and gained. It’s an introduction to more difficult things happening in our culture,” she says.

Even those of you who’ve attended a DreamWeek event might not know the man who dreamt the concept to life.

Head dreamer Nakpodia is a Nigerian-born entrepreneur and communications executive who was born in a village, was educated in London and landed in New York. Thankfully, he and his wife came to San Antonio to build a family, a business and a life.

He has a knack for bringing people together. In college, it was actually a side business. Today it’s serious, joyful business, growing audiences for DreamWeek’s established events while adding new ones every year.

He sees DreamWeek as bringing people together who might have been shouting at one another from across a river. On opposite banks, they’ve thrown rocks at one another. “A tolerant community has to know what the arguments are on the other side of the river,” he says. Planting yourself on one side isn’t working.

“The only way forward is respect, listening to others, and if we are honest enough the truth always prevails, always,” he says.

The stark, dark perspectives revealed during the 2016 presidential election have “always been there,” he says, “but were glossed over.” DreamWeek will attempt to “expose the good and the underbelly and press ourselves to deal with it.”

“Every year this celebration is not about the alt-right or the far left,” Nakpodia says. “It’s about the people in the middle, people who want to be fair.”

What does he mean by fair? Why, he asks for example, did people in the United States seem not to mourn the Turkish nightclub shootings as much as similar incidents in the West? Why did we mourn the loss of 12 journalists in a Parisian magazine but have yet to demonstrate sympathy for similar ongoing loss in Mexico, one of the most dangerous places on Earth for journalists?

“What is it that makes a Mexican life less valued than others?” he says. “Tell me, ‘Why a wall (with Mexico)? Why not a wall with Canada?’The way we settle such questions is what DreamWeek is about.”

Nakpodia has seen the impact a DreamWeek event can have. When a group of at-risk children and their parents were invited to the Plaza Club for an event, he said, it changed the way some of them saw themselves. “They felt valued,” he says. “They had never seen the city from that vantage point.”

Last year, another DreamWeek event had a similar impact when the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the DoSeum partnered to host a naturalization ceremony in which immigrant children became U.S. citizens. Fifty children will take their oaths on Saturday. “Genius exists in that group,” he says, his voice filled with anticipation.

As is always the case with Nakpodia, he’s dreaming to 2018, the city’s 300th anniversary, when he hopes DreamWeek will celebrate with at least 300 events.

He’s also envisioning a DreamWeek that serves as a U.S. destination, drawing people nationally and internationally to San Antonio to attend DreamWeek and celebrate King. He hopes to draw renowned speakers and thinkers from Mexico City, Geneva and Prague, the United Nations and the American Red Cross — one every evening of DreamWeek, he says — without sounding one bit like he’s just dreaming.

Elaine Ayala has been in the newspaper business for 33 years as a reporter, editor, blogger and columnist. She has worked at six metropolitan dailies, including the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, the Arizona Daily Star, The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, the Austin American-Statesman and the El Paso Times

She has worked at the San Antonio Express-News for 16 years. Her Metro column runs on Monday in the Express-News and in its bilingual weekly Conexión. She writes a Latino Life blog about "Latino arts, politics y mas" on MySanAntonio.com. Her minority affairs beat focuses on diversity and ethnic communities.

The San Antonio native graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979.

Ayala has been involved in several journalism organizations throughout her career, most focused on increasing the number of minorities and women in the U.S. newsroom and raising money for scholarships for students pursuing careers in the media.

She speaks at area schools and community organizations and has served as a mistress of ceremonies for several galas and events. In addition to her newspaper work, she has written for several publications, including Latino magazine, Latino Future magazine, the National Catholic Reporter and a couple of now-defunct magazines.